In Beijing's dense haze, little is visible these days. Vega and Altair dimly shining through in the early evening. The brightest object was what I'm pretty certain was an Iridium 13 flare at 18:37, which I initially thought might have been a meteor. It appeared to move far more swiftly than an Iridium satellite, but its position and trajectory matched an Iridium exactly. Maybe its speed was an illusion somehow created by the haze?
Hazy and cloudy conditions have made nighttime viewing difficult recently. But had a look today at sunspot region 923, which is as large and prominent as when I'd seen it during the transit of Mercury. Now it is on the opposite side of the solar disk, and has been joined by two much smaller regions reminiscent of the apparent size of Mercury when it crossed the sun.
Something odd has been going on in astronomical circles these last few years in Daqing, the oil capital of northeastern China. As the message below posted on Chinese bulletin boards reveals, the Daqing amateur astronomical society was closed down in the mid-1990s for "historical reasons" -- which is often a polite way in China of referring to some kind of political problem. It has now finally, after "several years" of effort by an enthusiast, been re-launched. One wonders what the problem could possibly have been.
发表于: 2006-11-11, 11:43 发表主题: 热烈祝贺大庆市天文爱好者协会于2006年11月10日正式成立！！ 引用并回复 返回页首
大庆市天文爱好者协会最早成立于1986年，后来因为历史原因90年代中期取消了，经过王仁君老师的多年努力，在大庆市政府、市科协和石油高中校领导的大力支持下，大庆市天文爱好者协会再次以崭新的面貌于2006年11月10日下午在大庆市石油高级中学（简称石油高中）正式召开成立大会（当天正值台湾著名天文摄影家林启生先生第二次光临大庆石油高级中学进行天文讲座）。
这次协会成立收到了来自中国天文学会普及委员会、香港天文学会、新疆维吾尔族自治区天文学会、青岛市天文爱好者协会、云南省天文学会、湖北省天文学会等各地兄弟学会、协会的贺电！光临这次成立大会的嘉宾有：大庆市长助理、大庆市科协主席、副主席、石油高中校长等市里和校里领导及来自宝岛台湾的林启生先生。
大会进行了宣读协会章程、组织机构名单、会员义务等项。
大庆天文爱好者协会组织机构名单如下：
顾 问： 王立杰
侯丽华
特约顾问： 林启生
理 事 长： 王仁君
副理事长： 张学军
秘 书 长： 杨景艳
理 事： 宋仁克、王俊峰、桑宇、乔辉、邢玉平、
李永志、张连军、孙同辰、 姚京声
Thought I caught a very faint glimps of Comet Swan around 6:45 pm local time as an intermittently visible tiny point of light within a miniscule fuzzy blob. Even got as far as sketching it but discovered after double checking later with TheStar6 that I was probably looking in not quite the right spot (off by a few arcminutes perhaps). By then whatever it was I was looking at was no longer visible. I strongly suspect on further reflection that it was 9.26 magnitude SAO104162 (an achievement seeing even this given the slightly hazy conditions). I wish there was some website that enabled one to check what other observers were seeing within the last 24 hours using similar sized scopes. Maybe there is.
This time tried asteroid 7 Iris with 10x50 binos, and found it with little difficulty in an area of limiting magnitude around 7.4 (with binos). Attached is a sketch of what I saw, drawn without reference to any star chart. Interesting later comparing this with TheSky6's chart for the same FOV. Although the stars I drew matched some of those shown on the software, there were a couple of others at the outer edge of visibility which I should have seen but didn't (see attached image from TheSky6 compared with insert). But no doubt about having seen 7 Iris anyway.
Observing the asteroid also gave me a chance to view ther Hyades properly for the first time. Not being a Messier object I had overlooked it before. With the ETX-90 and 26mm eyepiece it had been impossible to take in such a large FOV. But through the binos it was a pretty sight. Tried again for Comet SWAN earlier in the evening with the ETX-90, but again unable to find it.
